Is there a rainbow between crises? Lessons from thin-level convergence in an external assistance-intervened country

Anchored in the EU’s objective of promoting territorial cohesion and reducing inequalities, as articulated in SDG 10 and the “Leave No One Behind” principle, our study analyzes economic convergence between the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic in Portugal, a country that underwent successful intervention through an external financial assistance program. Using municipal-level data—a fine-grained approach new to Portuguese growth empirics—we uncover clear signs of sigma and beta convergence, both unconditional and conditional, detailed through quantile estimation. Real per-capita income gaps narrowed most sharply in municipalities at the higher end of the conditional growth distribution. Education, market competition, and trade openness emerge as the strongest drivers of this progress, advising policies that prioritize human capital, competitive local markets, and deeper international integration.